Researchers at Intel are working on ways to mask the intricate functionality of massive multicore chips to make it easier for computer makers and software developers to adapt to them. These multicore chips will also likely contain both x86 processing cores, as well as other types of cores. A 64-core chip, for instance, might contain 42 x86 cores, 18 accelerators and four embedded graphics cores. In addition, Intel has updated its Itanium roadmap.

It is but that's not what it was designed for. Intel originally wanted the Itanium to take over the server market first and move on to desktop chips in the future. It didn't work out that way and for a while it looked like Intel was going to lose it's shirt on the chip. If you want to crunch lots of numbers in a specialized scientific app you can use some sort of vector processor(Cell, Alitvec) which is designed to work on multiple pieces of data at once not a general purpose CPU that can run 3 instructions at once.

I'm not saying that multiple cores are a bad thing, far from it, I'm saying that software has a long long way to go and I don't think we'll get there until long after these chips are out and we have some time to play. Parallelism is something we(Computer Scientists) have been trying to do forever and there's just some things that can't be done in parallel.

There are lots of bottlenecks in CPU architecture right now, memory bandwidth is the most obvious.